college football – Extracurricularshttp://www.wendyparker.org
Discoveries, rants and comfort-food cravings of a sports omnivoreTue, 02 Feb 2016 16:36:58 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.14If the news from the gridiron has you downhttp://www.wendyparker.org/2014/09/if-the-news-from-the-gridiron/
Wed, 10 Sep 2014 15:50:47 +0000http://www.wendyparker.org/?p=9383Tweet

The Ray Rice story and the continuing angst by many Americans about the National Football League and the game of football is snowballing into a truly disturbing heap, and this probably will not stop anytime soon.

It’s too soon to know if these events reflect some kind of tipping point in our reverence for football — especially Roger Goodell’s handling of the sordid Rice saga. I do know more and more people who are terribly conflicted about that story, as well as concussions and the physical violence of the gridiron, that they’re not watching the game any longer, or they’re seriously considering turning away.

And then last night, I opened up the current issue of The New Yorker — with Derek Jeter on the cover — and read “Phi Beta Football,” a splendid little story by John McPhee, recalling the glorious Princeton single-wing teams of his youth, and what became of the men of his generation who played there. It was written in typically graceful, elegant McPhee fashion, and I quickly thought about a post I wrote a couple weeks ago about the challenges of writing stylishly about football.

“Phi Beta Kappa” more than fits the bill for what I hope will be a future collection of football stories.

There’s also this excerpt in the Los Angeles Review of Books from “Why Football Matters,” which I blogged about recently. I think I was a bit unfair to author Mark Edmundson, whose love-hate relationship with the game more finely balanced than I first thought. Mostly, he writes of how compelling the game has always been for him, in spite of its dangers and dehumanizing effects, and he rightly suspects he is far from alone on this:

“I’m fascinated by the way that the game combines violence and beauty. Pater said that he loved it when art merged beauty and strangeness. But violence and beauty — there’s something about that, too. It’s been said ballplayers look like Homeric warriors, and they do, but football players may more closely resemble knights, jousting in a tournament, with rules and standards and dignity and respect for the opponent, though it is dangerous, too.”

At some point I’d like to think there will be an honest, open public discussion about football along the lines of Edmundson’s argument. For the moment, the mainstream media and social media channels are convulsed with football — and many other sports — primarily in the context of social issues (domestic violence, gay athletes, race and gender, etc.), and that won’t be subsiding anytime soon.

I still believe that while the game of American football is inherently brutal, it is an honorable code that is played, coached and operated by mostly honorable people who do not commit crimes, who do not brutalize women and who do not try to evade or sweep away ugly matters.

]]>Sports History Files: The original sins of college footballhttp://www.wendyparker.org/2014/08/sports-history-files-the-original-sins-of-college-football/
Thu, 28 Aug 2014 14:15:12 +0000http://www.wendyparker.org/?p=9241Tweet

The violence, crippling injuries, academic short cuts and other dysfunctional components of the present-day world of college football are hardly new.

Nor do they date back only a half-century or so, when the NCAA finally modernized in the early 1950s, cracked down on rule-breakers and reigned in athletic departments that wanted to cut their own television and business deals.

That’s partly because the problems referred to by reformers, academics, media types and others these days — usually with little to no effect — have been with college football from its origins.

Sports historians have been writing about these matters over the years — notably Ronald Smith and Michael Oriard. But with college football’s primacy on the rise again — the new SEC Network, a new playoff format, among other lucrative changes — a journalist employed by one of the major players in the college athletics industry has taken a fresh, unflinching look at the game as it has always been contested.

Big Ten Network host Dave Revsine’s “The Opening Kickoff: The Tumultous Birth of a Football Nation,” has received plenty of well-deserved attention for making it very clear that the nefarious activity we fret about today has never been separated from the compelling entertainment product first popularized more than a century ago.

Revsine, whose book examines college football between 1890 and 1915, writes in his introduction:

“What if I told you the current problems in college football might actually be viewed as an improvement — that, in some regards, the college game was once far worse than it is today?”

His first chapter, excerpted here in Sports Illustrated, details the 1893 Thanksgiving Day game between Princeton and Yale in New York City that contained all the elements familiar to today’s fans: Excessive media hype, a full-house crowd of more than 50,000 at Manhattan Field (on the site of the future Polo Grounds) and heavy wagering.

Only four years later, the death of Von Albade Gammon, a 17-year-old University of Georgia football player injured in a game against Virginia, prompted calls that football be banned (GQ excerpt here).

These cries would continue into the new century, from within the academy as well as the media responsible for so much of the hype. Notably, Oriard contended the newspapers were lashing out to boost circulation more than reflect concern over player safety.

But in 1905, after 18 players died from on-the-field injuries, President Theodore Roosevelt finally called college football leaders to the White House. Rules changes, such as the forward pass, were enacted, though player deaths continued. The organization that eventually was created out of this movement was the National Collegiate Athletic Assocation.

Revsine, a former ESPN host and son of a late Northwestern University professor, also weaves into his narrative the story of Pat O’Dea, an Australian who played for Wisconsin in the late 1890s. He was one of the sport’s first big-time stars, boasting supreme kicking skills in an age when brute force dominated.

And as Hiawatha Bray noted in a review in The Boston Globe, Johnny Manziel had nothing on O’Dea when it came to off-the-field notoriety, especially with the ladies.

David Jones of The Patriot-Newshas more on how Revsine came to write, and research, the book; Revsine sat down with John Feinstein and Bill Littlefield for radio interviews that are worth the listen.

On his own network, Revsine also was the host of a panel discussion about the problems of college football, seen through the historical lens he has provided, and including Ronald Smith as a guest. And here’s Revsine in a Q and A with Big Ten Network colleague Tom Dienhart earlier this week:

“That is what I worry about the most with the game, the injuries and concussions. It’s an area where we certainly could learn (from the past). Part of what they did was they changed the rules dramatically. People say you can’t change the rules, the game is good as it is; you change the fundamental nature of the game (if you change the rules). And that’s exactly what they did then. They changed the fundamental nature of the game. You know what? Some would argue they got a better game out of it. I do think that’s an area we can learn from history.”

On Wednesday I highlight noteworthy new sports books, with links to reviews, interviews and other information about the subject and/or author. Today my focus is on the college football season that officially kicks off Thursday. In the coming weeks new books will be featured here about the NFL.

* * * * * * * *

Michael Weinreb is hardly the only author with a new book on college football. But he has originally, and expertly, blended the contemporary mania for the sport with a deep dive into the past of the game’s fanaticism, and some of its most signature contests, in “Season of Saturdays: A History of College Football in 14 Games.”

Weinreb, who grew up in State College and wrote one of the most memorable pieces on the Penn State scandal as it unfolded, makes a compelling case for each of the classics he catalogs — from the very first college game, between Princeton and Rutgers, in 1869, to last year’s stupendous Iron Bowl.

In between are the 1966 tie between Notre Dame and Michigan State, the 1979 Sugar Bowl win by Alabama over Penn State at the peak of the Bear Bryant era, Texas’ 2006 win over USC in the Rose Bowl, and Boise State’s thrilling Fiesta Bowl win over Oklahoma in 2007.

Those latter games are getting plenty of attention on the Web (excerpts here and here on Grantland and SB Nation, respectively). But there’s plenty of serious college football history here, as Weinreb references the significance of the Boise State feat to the early days of the game:

“College football has never been very kind to the underdog, and I imagine some of this has to do with the fact that it is, and always has been, an unrepentant oligarchy. It used to be that this oligarchy was centered around geographic regions; now it’s based on rough (and often nonsensical) geographic conflagrations of teams called conferences. . . .

“And yet it still happens that, every so often, a certain determined and enterprising school/coach manages to elevate a wayward program from the lower class. This has been true for decades, and it will remain true for as long as big-time college football offers both money and prestige to the schools that partake of it.”

With a new college football playoff launching this season (see below), the novelty may be coming to an end. While Boise State, cut out of the automatic qualifier ranks due to realignment, plays Ole Miss tonight, Weinreb proclaims in a podcastwith Will Leitch of Sports on Earth that college football is “the most political of all sports, because it’s based on complete subjectivity.”

In an excerpt in Rolling Stone, Weinreb tries to understand how the old-school phenomenon of Nick Saban and the blade runner presence of the University of Oregon can co-exist in the same era. It’s all part of his desire to explain the eternally maddening incongruities of a sport with a past like no other:

“In the end, it reverts back to the beginning. This is a pastime that was born as a spontaneous exercise on the grassy courtyards of the Ivy League, the brainchild of restless undergraduates seeking to blow off steam by barking each other’s shins and throwing punches. And even now, 150 years later, as it is industrialized and corporatized and rendered in Technicolor at places like Oregon, as it is commanded and controlled and repressed by scrupulous men like Nick Saban, it is still ultimately untamable. There are those who seek to maintain control over the beast, and there are those who wish to set it free. Eventually, the adults give way to the children, and all we can do is watch.”

Stewart Mandel, formerly of Sports Illustrated and newly hired by Fox Sports, has followed up his 2008 book, “Bowls, Polls and Tattered Souls,” with an update on the state of the governance — such as it is — of college football with the new four-team format for determining a national champion.

The games begin Thursday, featuring the SEC showdown between Texas A & M and South Carolina. The season culminates with semifinals in the Sugar Bowl and Rose Bowl, followed by a championship game that is later than ever, on Jan. 12, at the AT & T Stadium (aka Jerry Dome) near Dallas.

“The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the College Football Playoff” explores the recent wave of realignment, television contracts and a system to replace the Bowl Championship Series. Mandel is a hotel lobby camper extraordinaire, as he patiently waited for bowl, conference and television officials, administrators and coaches where they met to restructure the end of the season:

“I’m a BCS governance junkie. I have an unquenchable thirst for recusal policies, host bowls and revenue distributions. So over the course of two-plus years I gained a pretty good grasp of the ins and the outs of the system that would eventually be called — wait for it — the College Football Playoff.”

For its simplistic name, the CFP is confusing, hardly clearing up the chaotic organization of the sport he wrote about in his earlier book:

“This being college football, you may find yourself scratching your head at various junctures. You may feel the need to reread a certain passage a couple of times. Don’t feel bad. Even the people that work in college football don’t fully understand this thing yet.”

But do read with a pop quiz in mind, because that’s what Mandel has served up at the end.

On Tuesday I write about developments in sports media, and occasionally step back in time to a different era in sports journalism. This week I am devoting posts to the upcoming American football season, college and pro, with a focus on new books and writings on the subject.

* * * * * * * *

Can high-minded writing about American football ever be as lyrical, as soaring, as the celebrated literature of baseball?

It’s the latest sports title in the continuing Library of America series (I wrote about previous collections of the work of Red Smith and Ring Lardner here and here), and Schulian has done a marvelous job selecting 44 pieces, from Grantland Rice to Michael Lewis.

There are some lesser-known (to football fans) writers in the collection that include Jeanne Marie Laskas, whose 2008 GQ article, “G-L-O-R-Y!,” profiled the unglamorous jobs of NFL cheerleaders that have been in the news recently. The other female byline in the anthology is that of Jennifer Allen, writing about her late father, coach George Allen.

The other subjects — from Red Grange to Dick Butkus to Jim Brown to Johnny Unitas to Tom Landry to Bear Bryant and more — are all compelling enough.

But does the nature of football tie the hands of even the best writers to produce the kind of (Angellic, even?) prose commonly associated with baseball? Is it even a fair comparison to make?

In a lengthy interview on Deadspin with Alex Belth, Schulian has a theory about that, indirectly, pointing out that “primitive conditions” for covering football in what he termed the “Pleistocene era” made an already difficult sport to write about more challenging:

“I like to think that’s why I came up empty when I looked for compelling pieces by Heywood Broun and Damon Runyon. Both were memorable writers and, yet, when I read what they had to say about the sport, it seemed strained, uninformed, almost naïve—in other words, it was a lot like everything I ever wrote about hockey.”

The Rice selection is not his famous 1924 column for The New York Herald-Tribune about the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. No “blue-gray October sky,” as Schulian tells Belth he didn’t want to go “wading in the sludge of old Granny’s hyperbole, and I wasn’t about to risk scaring off readers that way.” Instead, Schulian has chosen a piece from Rice’s memoir, “The Tumult and the Shouting,” about how he came to write the Notre Dame column. Schulian adds:

“I’ve wondered how different it would be if Rice had been able to avail himself of today’s press-box replays and the locker-room interviews that were so scarce when he walked the earth.”

Another writing luminary Schulian includes is Southern humorist Roy Blount, Jr., whose love for the Pittsburgh Steelers prompted a 40-year reprisal of Franco Harris’ touchdown catch in the 1972 playoffs published as “Immaculate Memory” in Sports Illustrated:

“Who reminds us of who we are? People who knew us when. I went to see L.C. Greenwood, the former defensive end. L.C. is the one Steeler not in the Hall of Fame who most should be. (No. 2: Donnie Shell.) In the first Steelers Super Bowl he blocked three of Fran Tarkenton’s passes, and in the second one he was even better. He had more career sacks than Joe Greene. I wrote in my book that L.C. might leave practice wearing a blue pullover sleeveless suit, brown pantyhose, a shoulder bag and a necklace a lady had given him that said TFTEISYF, which stood, of course, for ‘The first time ever I saw your face.’ “

In a review for The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Jonathan Eig, while admiring many pieces in the anthology, concludes:

“I was left with the sense that whatever the changing fortunes of individual sports might be, the best football writing is still not as good as the best baseball writing.”

Eig, a biographer of Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson, praises baseball’s simplicity and linear qualities he says are easier to write about than what transpires on a gridiron. But he raved about Wright Thompson’s ode to Southern football, “Pulled Pork and Pigskin,” for ESPN.com:

“Overwritten? Hell yes! And keep it coming.”

Eig figures that football writing is gaining ground in style as it reflects its high status in popular culture, amid the crunching tackles, concussions and seemingly vicarious violence:

“When writers look back on American culture in the early 21st century, I suspect they’ll turn to football more than baseball. The loudmouthed Richard Sherman of the Seahawks will seem a lot more attractive to storytellers than that elegant but hopelessly gray Yankee, Derek Jeter. The crunch of shoulder pads will tell more about society than the crack of ball on bat.”

Schulian wonders how the presentation of football will shape writing that aims to go deeper than what couch-sitting fans can readily see and experience:

“What makes the writer’s task more difficult than ever is that TV has seized on the human dimension, too. Its technical brilliance was never in question. All the cameras, all the angles—I don’t know why anyone wants to watch a game in person when they can see it so much better at home. Actually, I do. They go for the tailgating and the camaraderie, the cheerleaders and the chance to be on camera with their shirts off when the thermometer nosedives below freezing. Most of all, they go for the tribal passion that sent football rushing into America’s bloodstream in the first place.”

An audio interview here with Schulian, on NPR‘s “Only a Game,” in which he says that football “has certainly entered a dark period” with the concussion issue and the suicide of Chicago Bears great Dave Duerson, another topic in his anthology. Schulian, Laskas and Deford also talk about the book, and their pieces in it, on NPR‘s “Weekend Edition Saturday” with Scott Simon.

Concludes Erik Spanberg, in his review for The Christian Science Monitor:

“Other than the billionaires who own NFL teams, no one in football has it easy. Which, for better and worse, helps explain why we can’t stop watching the glamorous wreckage before us.”

On Monday my post is generally related to a sports topic prominently in the news, is focused on the business of sports or covers a sports subject at random. This week I am devoting posts to the upcoming American football season, college and pro, with a focus on new books and writings on the subject.

* * * * * * * *

This time two years ago, I drafted a post that went unpublished about why I’m never ready for football season. In the wake of the Penn State tragedy, enormous hand-wringing about concussions, suicides, bounty-hunting and the brutal nature of the game that belies the entertainment product we eagerly consume, there was this:

The NFL season began on a Wednesday.

In college football, which kicks off this Thursday with three games and another on Friday, every fall Saturday feels like New Year’s Day. For diehards, this is absolute heaven. For SEC diehards, with the arrival of an ESPN-run network devoted entirely to their conference, this is beyond heaven.

For the moment, I simply want to enjoy the summer a little longer, even with the pests and the heat and the dimming prospects of a Braves post-season run.

When I covered college football, I occasionally thought this way too, but quickly got jolted into action by the reality of games, practices, press conferences, deadlines and travel. As a fan these days, watching from afar, through the relentless filter of the tube, I fear that my admiration for the sport is getting overwhelmed by the spectacle it has become.

Not just the televised spectacle, where pro and college games regularly run past three hours, 30 minutes, featuring a deluge of commercials and mystifying remarks from commentators speaking very loudly and inventing their own blithering language as they go along.

And not just the 24/7 media spectacle, a gluttony of “breaking news” that’s merely a confirmation of another outlet’s reporting, non-stop “power rankings” and quick-hitting “takes” filed moments after the final gun explaining “what we have learned” from the game that just ended.

Who’s “we,” exactly? And why is it assumed I always want to learn something? Maybe I just want to watch a game, not prep for a pop quiz.

But while I may be moderately chastened, short story writer and essayist Steve Almond feels so aggrieved by the sport he admits to loving that he’s written a blistering broadside just in time for a new season.

Two years ago, as I pondered my football indifference, Patrick Hruby heatedly stated his boycott termson Sports on Earth. He is among a growing chorus of media commentators finding it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the sheer beauty and excitement of football — I’ve been watching the end of last year’s Iron Bowl all summer — with the crippling injuries and violence.

Almond lashes out against all that too, and in a recent book excerptin The Boston Globe, lays on the guilt quite heavily, going far beyond concerns about brain trauma:

“Over the past year, I’ve studied the history of football and thought a lot about what the game means. I’ve come to believe that football fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, misogyny, and militarism. I believe it does economic damage to our communities and to the national soul. These are some of the reasons why I’ve stopped watching.”

There is absolutely nothing new about any of this. For more than 40 years, this definition of American football has been under attack by many social critics and even former football players like Jack Scott and Dave Meggysey.

In “Out of Their League,” his memoir of life as an NFL linebacker, Meggysey bemoaned what he called the “dehumanizing” experience of playing football. His was a sensibility rooted in the social justice movements of the 1960s and which came into limited prominence in the sports world in the following decade. It still endures with those on the hard political left.

Their critique of American football embodies what they believe to be a toxic masculinity. This is at the heart of Almond’s hackneyed argument, and it is a topic I will take up later in the week. Unlike Meggysey’s time in the spotlight, we now live in a climate of queasiness about player safety, the place of women in sports and jocks whose names are in the news for all the wrong reasons.

These worries are understandable, but as I will explore in the next few days, it’s not as simple as the claims Almond and others are making.

In a review in the Tampa Bay Times, John Capouya believes Almond is agonizing over things that don’t appear to have convinced many in Football Nation:

“Almond spends too much time making a case most football fans have already declined to prosecute or decided to ignore, which makes even this short book feel padded. And suppose a thinking captive comes to see the game for the corrupt, detrimental thing it is, what is he or she to do about it?”

“While those beasts grow ever larger, and must constantly be fed to a possibly unsustainable degree, this is about more than commercialism and the desire to win. The Southern complex of wanting to be better than those damn Yankees at something doesn’t fully explain it, either, although it does contain the seeds of this cultural fervor.”

A week from today, on Aug. 14, ESPN will launch the SEC Network, which figures to make your cable bill go up whether you live in Birmingham, Detroit, Seattle or Boston. The deal is a 20-year marriage that will significantly alter the financial equation for an already lucrative conference — although we don’t know how much right now.

The rich are not only growing richer, they’re also pricing themselves into a different planetary system. One of the few non-SEC entities that can hang financially is Texas, which if SEC radio host Paul Finebaum is to be believed, offered some astonishing cash to lure Nick Saban away from Alabama.

But it’s suspense like this that makes the SEC prime gridiron soap opera fare.

And now that ESPN is corralling so much more of the SEC enterprise — it hired Finebaum and assigned its own Gene Wojciechowski to help him write the book — the Worldwide Leader has a programming interest that’s second only to the NFL. The SEC is much richer, but less autonomous.

My post two years ago was more about the culture of college football in the South, and how that culture endures regardless of the money being thrown around. How the SEC handles that cultural legacy from here might be as carefully noted as the on-the-field and financial success that’s sure to continue to come its way.

What the early reviews point out is that while the authors reveal plenty about the “underbelly” of the sport — included the role of recruiting hostesses that truly abound in the South — this isn’t a screed.

Already “The System” has gotten a nice nod from Harvey Araton of The New York Times (who partnered with Keteyian on a similar book about the NBA, “Money Players”).

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports — no stranger to college football exposés — penned a rather enthusiastic review of “The System,” calling it “the best book on the sport written in years.”

There’s more beyond what’s been previously written about Jim Tressel at Ohio State, student-athlete tutoring deficiencies at Missouri, Texas Tech’s firing of Mike Leach, and plenty from Alabama’s Nick Saban, who gave the authors lots of access. Writes Wetzel:

By no means, is the book all negative stories. Keteyian and Benedict are fans at heart. There’s a fun weekend with T. Boone Pickens, including the pregame party at his huge ranch and the scene from inside his private jet. There are another couple days enjoying the good life with the ESPN “GameDay” crew. There’s a powerful look at the life and career of BYU linebacker Kyle Van Noy, who went through legal issues but embraced his second chance in Provo.

More on “The System” from Barrett Sallee of Bleacher Report, Steven Muma of SB Nation, and Dave Matter of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who reckons that Missouri athletics offiicals may not have been aware of the book and what was being reported about the tutoring program.

* * * * * * * *

John Bacon’s “Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football,” is raising questions about the veracity of several stories relating to the Penn State team from last season. A writing instructor at Michigan, Bacon focused his book, which will be published on Sept. 3, on the 2012 seasons of four Big Ten schools, including Michigan, Ohio State and Northwestern.

None of the disputed Penn State stories directly involve the Paterno-Sandusky scandal. In his review of the book, Dave Jones of The Patriot-News of Harrisburg quotes the father of Silas Redd, a former Penn State running back, denying Bacon’s assertion that he was “recruited” by rap star Snoop Dogg on a visit to USC. This was when the NCAA allowed Penn State players to transfer without restrictions following heavy sanctions levied on the Nittany Lions program. Redd did move to USC, but he, his father and USC all insist Snoop Dogg wasn’t involved at all.

This Q & A with Bacon by Onward State, an independent website serving the Penn State community, doesn’t allude to the alleged inaccuracies.

* * * * * * * *

Also just out — and just in time for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the March on Washington — is “Breaking the Line,” Samuel Freedman’s account of the 1967 black college football championship between Grambling and Florida A & M.

Led by two of the legendary coaching figures in the game — Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither, respectively — these teams battled at a time right before the full integration of college football.

Subtitled “The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights,” Freedman writes in depth about the quarterbacks, Grambling’s James Harris (later an NFL pioneer at the position for the Los Angeles Rams) and Ken Riley of Florida A & M.

The most gifted black players and coaches were both nurtured and trapped within their separate domain. With a mixture of bravado and bitterness, they called the all-black athletic conferences “the chitlin’ circuit,” a term borrowed from the string of ghetto theaters plied by black musicians and comedians. Ignored most of the time, slighted the rest, the men of black football tempered their skills and forged their reputations, as one college coach put it, “behind God’s back.”

A longer excerpt in The Daily Beast explains how Robinson turned Grambling, located in a rural outpost in northern Louisiana, into a college powerhouse and sent many players to the NFL, some of them Hall of Famers:

On the field and off, Robinson implemented his own version of separate but equal. In it, a black had to be better than a white merely to have an equal chance—better in the classroom, better on the field, better in his character. For Robinson, there was no point in railing against the unfairness of the world; resentment would devour you from the inside out. There was only the perpetual effort to improve the self and uplift the race.

In his informative, well-researched history of college football on television that was published nearly a decade ago, Alabama sportswriter Keith Dunnavant entitled his book “The 50 Year Seduction.”

The uneasy alliance between television networks and college football powerhouse schools began more or less around 1950, until the NCAA, fearing money losses at the gate, supressed greater exposure as long as it could.

Then, in 1984, the NCAA, sued by some of its member institutions over football contracts, was ruled a cartel by the U.S. Supreme Court. The free-wheeling floodgates soon opened for the kinds of conference and individual school contracts that were attempted at the outset, and that proliferate now.

At the end of a post about all this in January, I placed these historical trends against contemporary realignment developments, suggesting that the only thing that’s really changed are the names of some of the schools:

” . . . the most recent conference jumps by Maryland, Rutgers and Louisville illustrate that far from disrupting the order of things, those moves symbolize more than six decades of constant restlessness at the root of post-war college football.”

That the name of Louisville comes up at all in a conversation about college football is the direct result of television’s increasingly dominant hand in the direction of the sport, as The New York Times points out today. The second segment of a three-part series on ESPN‘s influence on college football illustrates that a school once synonymous with its men’s basketball program has become enriched commercially and nationally competitive across a broad range of sports by raising its profile in the sport that matters the most to fans, advertisers and TV networks.

This was done at the behest of then-Louisville president John Shumaker, and by seizing on the opportunity to play midweek football, a nationally televised window ESPN gives to lower-profile programs:

The key to the whole thing was football. In the economics of big-time college athletics, football is the alpha and the omega — generally by far the most profitable sport, because of the size of the crowds, the sponsorships and the lucrative television agreements. Perhaps two dozen elite universities make enough money from football, and to a lesser degree basketball, to subsidize their entire athletic departments. What Louisville had to do first, Mr. Shumaker decided, was replace the “not very attractive” and decidedly second-tier Cardinal Stadium, which opened in 1957, just after the graduation of Johnny Unitas, Louisville’s greatest football star.

The rest has been an unqualified success, although the story contains the usual threads of anxiety from academics about what the university has sacrificed in order to become an athletic behemoth.

In many ways, the saga of Louisville’s rise, expertly shepherded by athletic director Tom Jurich, offers a formula that his peers undoubtedly have heeded at universities with similar ambitions.

The larger context of all this is the scope of the Times series, which began on Sunday featuring how a 35-year-old USC graduate with a penchant for scheduling and spreadsheets has so many of college football’s elite at his beck and call. Ilan Ben-Hanan, ESPN‘s senior vice president for college football programming and acquisitions, is profiled as the ultimate maestro in how the nation’s second-most commercially successful sport is presented on its biggest televised stage.

ESPN‘s ability to get the major powers of college football to bend to its wishes is remarkable. “It works very well for us now that we’re used to it,” the Times quotes Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs as saying in reference to sudden schedule changes that the Worldwide Leader easily commands.

Now that we’re used to it.

This has gone far beyond the wooing stage, as Times writers Richard Sandomir, Steve Eder and James Andrew Miller explain right after that:

Underscoring ESPN’s special relationship with college football is the fact that it created and owns the software used for scheduling games. The online portal, known as the Pigskin Access Scheduling System, or PASS, is now used by virtually all conferences and colleges, as well as competing networks. Generally, the colleges work together to set up nonconference matchups, but sometimes they reach out to ESPN for a suggestion, or even to play matchmaker.

In January, Bob Arkeilpane, the deputy athletic director at Cincinnati, sent an e-mail to an ESPN executive, Dave Brown. Mr. Arkeilpane explained in the message, which was obtained by The Times, that Cincinnati would be opening a new premium seating area and press box in 2015 and needed a top-tier opponent.

Mr. Brown, who is well known for his thick Rolodex, wrote back that morning, “Will do — let me look and see what’s out there for ’15.”

Instead of calling around other athletic departments for an opponent, this administrator contacted ESPN. This is no mere seduction, and calling it a “special relationship” is to invoke a phrase describing the United States’ dealings with the United Kingdom. We all know who the boss is there.

But it also aptly describes who calls the shots in college football. This is outright ownership, with ESPN as more than exposure-granting overlord and friendly schedule assistant. That’s what is ultimately different about televised college football now, compared to the advent of the free-for-all age of the early 1980s, when university presidents sought to escape the clutches of NCAA control and negotiate their own contracts.

And so they have, with riches for so many more schools and conferences. But they also have bartered themselves to an institution that enjoys the same kind of power over them as the NCAA, in what is nominally a voluntary, mutually exclusive business relationship.

Keep that in mind when the college football season starts on Thursday night, with 10 of the 17 games available on some form of ESPN.And if you still can’t wait until Saturday after all that, half of the eight games on Friday — when high school games are going on — also carry an ESPN imprint.

Spencer Hall tries to explicate Jadeveon Clowney’s memorable tackle/forced fumble/recovery on Michigan’s Vincent Smith in the Outback Bowl in many ways, but remains flabbergasted all the more:

The part I still can’t wrap my brain around: Clowney did that with about eight yards of running room. In the span of 24 feet, he gained enough momentum to do that to Vincent Smith. The equation is F=MA, and the numbers work out, I’m sure, but the brain can only do so much. It’s a day later and my eyes still can’t believe the spectacle and brutality of applied physics in football pads. When you have a variable like Jadeveon Clowney, though, sense is never, ever part of the equation.

I have no use for football’s jack-‘em-up fetish. I loathe the mentality that cheers a blindside block on a helpless defender whose eyes are locked on a kick returner. I have seen cheap shots and I have seen Darryl Stingley in a wheelchair. But what Jadeveon Clowney did to Vincent Smith was none of that. The old Michigan State coach, Duffy Daugherty, once said, “Football’s not a contact sport, it’s a collision sport.” By that definition, Clowney’s tackle was as pure a demonstration of the game’s truest nature as we’re likely to see.

Before there was an International Bowl, and long before an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stage a Haka Bowl in New Zealand, a very famous rum manufacturer was able to persuade American college lads to head to Cuba for a scrap against local sides.

The Bacardi Bowl, staged seven times between 1907 and 1946, was also known as the Rhumba Bowl, for fairly self-evident reasons.